Interact with any app due to Drupal 8’s third-party integration features
Does your website have good communication skills? Is it friendly?
No, this is not going to be a post about mobile-friendliness or user-friendliness. What we would like discuss today is your site’s “friendship” with other systems, which enriches it with exceptional qualities. If your site is built with Drupal, it will never be lonely on the Web — it interacts incredibly well with external systems and applications. But Drupal’s latest version, Drupal 8, has brought third-party integration to an unprecedented level. Let’s take a closer look at it.
Third-party integration: possible “friends” for your Drupal website
The “friend list” for your website can be absolutely endless. It can integrate with mobile applications, various e-commerce payment gateways, marketing automation tools, CRM (customer relationship management) or ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems. Social networks, live chats, conferences, mailing, videos, translations and much more is available to you. And it’s just the beginning.
A hot trend of the day, especially in Drupal 8, is decoupled Drupal. This means combining Drupal’s back-end with some other system’s front-end. Most often, it is some super fast and dynamic app built on one of JavaScript frameworks (Node, React, Angular, Ember, Backbone, Vue, etc.). This approach creates rocket-like projects on the cosmic interactivity level.
Drupal 8’s exceptional third-party integration opportunities
Web services: Drupal 8’s integration miracle
First of all, the ease of third-party integration in Drupal 8 is associated with the REST protocol support and web services in core. Drupal 8’s built-in web services are a dream-come-true for many drupalers. Thanks to them, it is easy to create a RESTful API and output your site’s data in JSON, XML, HAL+JSON and similar formats required by certain third-party applications.
That’s why it’s not necessary for people to speak the same language to be friends — all you need is to be willing to find ways of communication. That’s what Drupal 8 and, for example, JavaScript frameworks are successfully doing now!
Drupal 8’s built-in RESTful services include core modules such as Serialization, Hypertext Application Language (HAL), RESTful Web services, and HTTP Basic Authentication.
An alternate approach, not related the REST architecture, deals with Facebook’s query language GraphQL. It has special performance improvement features like more precisely shaped requests to the database.
An ocean of additional integration modules
The Drupal community actively creates additional integration modules for particular third-party systems and tools. Many of them are ready to use in Drupal 8, and many have been created specifically for it. The list is truly extensive — from some simple JavaScript widget to Microsoft’s cognitive services with their artificial intelligence.
An improved library adding system
In Drupal 8, the process of adding third-party libraries has become more convenient and better arranged. They are now handled in YAML files. The faithful assistant in this issue, Libraries API, has also improved.
Wrap-up
Let your website make “friends” that will share their best qualities and experience with it! And one friend can be Drudesk support team. Our developers will help you use Drupal 8’s third-party integration capabilities to the full and help your “friendship” with other apps be most productive!